Independence Heights

The metal garage-and-office structure that once housed the Neff Rental location at the southwestern corner of Independence Heights has now been obliterated, a reader notes — sending the above photograph to serve as evidence of the building’s absence. Site work began at the property last month.

When construction is complete next year, a 30,000-sq.-ft. 365 by Whole Foods Market will face the North Loop feeder road, in front of an attached tilt-wall 12,000-sq.-ft. structure slated for a Houston Heights ER. A parking lot of 242 spaces will front Yale St. Immediately to the north on Yale, a 19,200-sq.-ft. strip center will be surrounded by additional parking.

Back in March, excavators were cleared from the site at the northeast corner of Yale St. and the 610 North feeder road after heavy-equipment rental facility Neff Rental shut down. But at least one of them is back again today, reports a Swamplot reader who passed by the site. It’s shown in the left side of the photo above, performing what appears to be some site prep work for the future home of Houston’s first-ever 365 by Whole Foods market. Also on site, in the foreground of the photo taken from Yale St.: a new construction trailer.

Opening date for the mini-Whole Foods Market at 3004 N. Yale St. at the southern border of Independence Heights — originally scheduled for 2017 —has been pushed back to next year, according to the Houston Business Journal.

More details on the planned Yale Marketplace development centered around the 365-branded mini Whole Foods planned for Independence Heights (but picking up the Garden Oaks moniker) come this week from Adolfo Pesquera, who posted the rendering above over at VBX of that companion strip mall planned just to the north of the grocery store. The structure looks to be slated for the narrow parcel of land where the long, low, industrial-slash-office park that until January hosted the Potter’s House Christian Church still stands.

Pesquera also reports that Houston Heights ER has officially signed on as the urgent care clinic that’ll be stuck to the side of the 365 (to the left, in the rendering below):

Several readers reported this morning that the Garden Oaks-Independence Heights border location of construction equipment rental shop Neff Rental, on the northeast corner of Yale St. and the North Loop, has been clearing out this week. That’s a prerequisite step before any new construction equipment can be moved back onto the site, to start work on the 365 Garden Oaks store Whole Foods has planned for the property (as rendered above).

Plans for the corner depict the mini-store accompanied by both attached and freestanding retail spots, 3 of which have pending leases with a dentist, a cellphone company, and a medical business respectively, according to the marketing materials trying to hawk the remaining space (highlighted in yellow):

The name Yale Street Commons is currently sprinkled about the edge of the Pine Forest Business Center northeast of Yale and 34th St. in the form of a few variance request notices (like the one shown above standing by the abandoned strip of rail track running along the 36th St. side of the warehouse park). That notice is for a request to merge 2 chunks of land within the rectangle made by Yale, 34th, 36th St., and the north-south line where E. 35th St. currently dead ends into the industrial-slash-office park, a few residential doors west of Cortlandt St. The applicant also appears to be asking for permission not to extend E. 35th St. all the way through the property, which sits near the border between Independence Heights and Garden Oaks. The 6-acre center, which in recent years has housed a variety of construction contractors, was sold in May to Stonelake Capital — currently at work on the Westheimer Oaks center and that Westheimer-fronting 5-acre make-it-a-park-for-now on either side of Mid Ln.

A collection of a couple dozen or so bungalows along E. 31st 1/2 St. between Yale and Cortlandt in Independence Heights just a block or so north of the 610 Loop is the city’s newest historic district — and perhaps the one with the most colorful name: Starkweather. The subdividing of the neighborhood predates the establishment of Independence Heights as an actual independent city in 1915, but most of the homes were built between the late 1920s (when the city was annexed by Houston) and the 1940s. They were originally marketed to the African American community in the neighborhood. Here’s a map:

GIGGLING CO-FOUNDERS OF NATION’S LARGEST PRIVATE PRISON FIRM RECALL HIJINX BEHIND THE CONVERSION OF HOUSTON’S OLYMPIC MOTEL TO IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTER And that motel is still standing, says a rep from Corrections Corporation of America; you can drive by the history yourself at 5714 Werner Rd. — just north, incidentally, of Independence Heights. Of course, the motel doesn’t seem to be taking reservations; the phone has been disconnected. But if you can’t book a room in the building, you can watch these fellas — CCA founders Tom Beasley and Don Hutto — reminisce about it. Though CCA’s practices have been called into question recently by Grassroots Leadership and Hair Balls, you wouldn’t know it from the fondness with which Beasley and Hutto tell the story of flying to Houston on New Year’s Eve in 1982, seeing the motel sign, and fixing up the place for the INS. It was quite a turnaround: Just a few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, Hutto says, the facility was open, processing “87 undocumented aliens” its very first day. You can watch the video here. [Hair Balls; Grassroots Leadership; CCA] Video still: CCA

The finishing touches are being put on this somewhat totemic new building at the ReUse Warehouse site in Independence Heights. This one’s built on the concrete slab and with the steel beams of the old Public Works machine shop here at 9003 Main St., downcycling that building’s roof for use as its ceiling. It’ll serve as office space for Solid Waste Management staff; it’ll also house a workshop to process donated materials (usually the leftovers from new builds and the salvaged stuff from demos) and feature a recycled-art gallery. Zen T. C. Zheng reports that the building should be ready to go by June.

After taking in this weekend’s open house at the thriving shipping-container art colony ensconced in Stephen and Thedra Cullar-Ledford’s Independence Art Studios at 419 Janisch Rd. between Shepherd and Yale (above), fine-arts hound Robert Boyd pokes around a few more streets in Independence Heights — and finds a lot more art lurking in the neighborhood’s big lots. Boyd writes: “I think we can say that this is a little hidden art neighborhood. And if it follows the pattern of other art neighborhoods like Montrose and Rice Military, in 25 years or so, it will be full of expensive townhomes.”